Net Nanny 6.5.2.x & MS Live Messenger 2011: I finally found it.

Getting mad enough to write an authoritative blog post on something is often a sure fire way to change your own mind.

I’m a long time MS messenger user and just wrote a blog post as a cathartic attempt to just let go of the fact that after 2-3 months of troubleshooting I couldn’t get the installable version of MS live messenger 2011 to do anything it is supposed to… my status updates didn’t post online, Facebook integration didn’t work, and even my messenger contacts status didn’t reliably show.

As mentioned, I wrote the blog to tell MS just how I felt and then decided to check one last thing: the netnanny web filter.  I should have check this earlier as a systematic isolation of the environmental variables, but I didn’t.

I found that if you set application exclusions in net nanny for msnmsgr.exe and wlcomm.exe, then everything starts magically and consistently working.

The real lesson here is how much time can be wasted by [smart?] people that don’t take the time to do systematic process of troubleshooting.  If I had tried to duplicate my findings on fresh install of windows 7, I could have isolated this problem very quickly.

Of course this means that Net Nanny won’t be recording or monitoring traffic from these applications.  If you are using Net Nanny to monitor social networking, it’s not a feasible work around.

Net Nanny engineers were already aware of the issue and assure me they are working on it.